Article published May 17, 2009 Salem Lutheran offers hope to struggling North Toledoans
Pastor Mary Lou Baumgartner, right, comforts a worshiper during a Tuesday night service at Salem Lutheran Church in North Toledo. Cash-strapped Salem serves some of Toledo's neediest.
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THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGT
)
In a pew at the far back of a North Toledo church, a man waved the preacher over as the service wound down.
Pastor Mary Lou Baumgartner came to sit with him and the woman beside him. Soon, hands clasped. Heads leaned forward in solemn conversation.
"He said, 'I'm drunk, hope it's OK I'm here,'•" the pastor later recounted. "And then I realized she was sobbing, and she said she was too sinful to be here."
At Salem Lutheran Church on Tuesdays after the 5 p.m. service, volunteers serve upward of 100 free meals to anyone who asks. The church's 51-year-old pastor is usually among the last to eat.
On the night she huddled with the drunk and the sinner, the dinner awaiting her in the basement grew cold. She hardly noticed.
Pastor Mary Lou Baumgartner talks about Salem Lutheran
For nearly two decades, Pastor Baumgartner has lent an ear to all the alcoholics and addicts, the mentally ill and the poor people, to all the broken souls who come through the always-open doors of this church.
On Tuesday evenings, economic statistics come to life on the sidewalk in the 1100 block of North Huron Street. The people waiting there - to worship, catch a meal, or both - are among Toledo's neediest, in one of the city's most back-to-the-wall neighborhoods.
Intern Pastor Emily Kuhn leads the congregation in communion. When Ms. Kuhn arrived at Salem in
August, she said North Toledo’s boarded-up buildings reminded her of post-Katrina New Orleans.
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THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGT
)
When Emily Kuhn, Salem's intern pastor, arrived in August for her year's stay in the parish house, North Toledo's many boarded-up buildings reminded her of post-Katrina New Orleans.
Polls report Americans are losing sleep over this recession, but Salem's pastor said the economy has barely grazed Vistula, Toledo's oldest neighborhood: "People around here are already poor."
Salem's history mirrors many old, mainline urban churches. Founded in 1842, the congregation's red-brick Gothic building opened its doors in 1871.
Most descendants of its German-immigrant founders long ago moved away to the winding streets of subdivisions. Except for the occasional urban pioneer, Vistula was left to those who couldn't escape. Salem's roughly 130-member congregation is increasingly made up of its neighbors. Most people new to the church cannot give nearly as much as they take.
An offering plate reveals the day’s meager donations to the church during a Tuesday night service.
The $4.06 offering on a recent weeknight said it all: A heap of coins, a few dollar bills. Tuesday services are now better attended than Sunday, but the brass collection plate on weeknights - rarely yielding more than $10 - is always a small sum that reflects great generosity.
"It's not that other neighborhoods aren't in crisis," Pastor Baumgartner said, "it's just that most here don't have the luxury of hiding it."
These days, Salem is open seven days a week - for worship and Bible study, but also groceries, breakfast, lunch, dinner, tutoring, computer labs, and other programs for kids, ex-convicts, drug addicts, and alcoholics.
"A lot of people say we do more social work than ministry, but that's all part of our ministry," Craig Bruns said. At 78, he's a lifelong member, like his father and founding-member grandfather before him.
He has also been treasurer since 1956, and last month had bad news for the church council: "We're down to our last [funds], and when those run out, I don't know what we'll do."
Salem's mission to poor people is flourishing. But tending the flock, even on a shoestring, is costly. Pastor Baumgartner said the church has enough to cover monthly expenses of $16,000 for the next half year.
And so it is that Toledo's oldest Lutheran church is both thriving and failing.
Spreading the message
Homespun storyteller Garrison Keillor famously portrays Lutherans as an earnest, polite, cautious lot. A recent meeting at Salem suggested he may not be wrong.
One rainy April afternoon, Pastor Mary Lou and 13 other Lutherans (most pastors) met in the church basement, the third such gathering of the Salem Sustenance Team. Its task: Brainstorm how to keep the church on financial life support.
Grant writing? Brochures to explain Salem's mission? A presentation at the synod assembly? Pledge cards?
When Salem last faced a dire crunch - three other times in Pastor Baumgartner's tenure - the church wrote letters asking other congregations for help.
"The interpretation was, 'Don't give money to Salem, they're just going to close anyway,'•" said Pastor Baumgartner, unwilling to risk another letter-writing strategy.
"I know Salem's history. I've been formed by this story," said Tim Reynolds, who interned at Salem and is now a pastor in Defiance. "What about having people go [to other congregations and] tell the Salem story?"
Amid continued discussion, Pastor Baumgartner whispered to her intern, who then slipped upstairs. Moments later, Pastor Kuhn returned with Tony Laster, a middle-aged man who seemed only slightly bewildered when asked for his life story.
"Before Salem," he began, "I had lived a very, let's say, raggedy life."
Ups and downs
Crack and booze. Sobriety for 10 years. Relapse. And then, one day he woke up and couldn't walk. Stranded in bed, Tony said in a separate interview, he endured involuntary detox.
"I was about to die," the one-time auto worker told the basement group, "and even though God delivered me from drugs, my life was a shambles."
Mr. Laster was so terrified of another relapse, living in a neighborhood where crack and alcohol were as close as the sidewalk outside his house, that he "hid myself away in the house for, like, a year and a half."
But hunger won out.
"Someone invited me to Salem for dinner. I didn't have much food in the house," he told his rapt listeners, "and the food was delicious. And the ladies were so nice to me. I'm like a stray cat: You feed me, and I'm gonna keep coming back."
Gradually, Mr. Laster said, the weekly meals and worship coaxed him back to life.
"Hiding out, I was lonely. I wanted to die, even though God had accepted me. But God uses people, and God used Salem to help me. And I believe God sends other people here to be helped, and I would like for Salem to still be here."
Mr. Laster is now a volunteer fixture at Salem's parish house (where Pastor Kuhn corralled him). He routinely hosts Tuesday dinners, and has a standing offer to preach from Pastor Baumgartner, who said she sees in him a potential, if nontraditional, fellow clergy member.
Energized by the soft-spoken man's account, the pastors and lay people buzzed again with ideas. Throughout, Mr. Laster sat quietly, occasionally nodding and smiling. Near the meeting's end, he slowly lifted a hand into the air.
"Can I say something? Is it possible that some of you pastors can come on a Tuesday night and see the people? There are a lot of people here just like me."
Bible study first, worship second, though neither is mandatory for the night's third activity and biggest draw: The free meal, followed by the weekly substance-abuse support group.
The full slate helps explain why a Tuesday night at Salem tends to be as chaotic, noisy, and messy as human nature itself. It also makes vivid the church's focus on "urban ministry," a specialization never described better than by words attributed to Jesus: "As you've done to the least of these, you've done to me."
Pastor Baumgartner typically preaches at the front of the church, unperturbed by the steady din floating at the rear of the sanctuary, where people chat and children burble without restraint.
Pastor Kuhn, 27, from small-town North Carolina and a graduate of Yale Divinity School, remembered how the microphone was on the fritz the first weeknight she preached, "so I was basically screaming my sermon because the noise was so loud."
It can seem at moments as if a party and a worship service are simultaneously under way. As Marcus Lohrmann, bishop of the Northwestern Ohio Synod, observed: "Ministry among people in poverty is not always neat, not always clean, and does not always smell good."
That Pastor Baumgartner was mother to small children of her own probably aids her concentration, but no matter. "Not everybody listened to Jesus give the Sermon on the Mount," she reasoned, shrugging with equanimity.
Minister and resident
Arriving here from her native Minnesota in 1990, Mary Lou Baumgartner was a shiny-new, earnest pastor. Determined to do urban ministry, her only experience was a Los Angeles internship - in the notorious South Central area rocked by rioting in 1992 after the highly publicized beating of Rodney King by police officers.
Pastor Baumgartner and her ex-husband rented a place in their new neighborhood. Their kids (now 23, 19, 18, and 16) grew up in Vistula.
"My son was born a few months after we got to Toledo. And I remember seeing five-year-old boys outside at midnight and thinking, 'Oh, my God, how am I going to keep my kids inside?'•"
But she thought it crucial to be visibly committed to Salem. Soon, she bought a towering 1895 house adjacent to the church, "a fact which I have come to regret."
She loves that hulk of a house, but it's tough to maintain and ever more costly. And while living beside the church cemented her commitment, it sometimes saps her.
"Some kid will ring the bell at 7 a.m. if he needs something for school. Someone else will come at 1 in the morning because they just got beat up at [a nearby bar]. This neighborhood is full of people who, for a variety of reasons, have no boundaries."
One subzero night in January, she let a homeless alcoholic nicknamed Highway spend the night on her glassed-in front porch. He stayed till April.
In the last seven months, Pastor Baumgartner's house was broken into seven times. Last month, you could say she sort of threw in the proverbial towel - then packed it and lots of other stuff and moved to Monclova Township.
"A year ago," she conceded, "it would have given me pause."
But a parishioner from another Lutheran church, whom she met when he volunteered at Salem, offered temporary use of a serene, ravine-view house he bought at auction. Pastor Baumgartner snapped it up on behalf of Maya, her 16-year-old daughter and the last of her kids still at home.
"She has said things to me, like, 'When I have kids, I'm going to raise them in a diverse place just like [North Toledo],'•" the pastor said. But by the same token, she added:
"The hard part of growing up with neighborhood friends is seeing them fall. Jail, pregnancy, almost homelessness. Maybe graduating [high school], but not going beyond or even getting a job, because that's just not what they see. I think for Maya that's part of the wanting to get out. It's very painful to watch."
Their new home is near Manley and Salisbury roads, 13 miles and a world away from the North End. A white brick house, it sits on a quiet cul de sac where, down the street recently, a Saab, BMW, and Volvo clogged a neighboring driveway.
"I have come to know [Maya] as a person to whom order is very important," the pastor said of her daughter, "and the lack of order in our home was hard for her. We walk into this place and she's thrilled. None of mom's papers are there. She loves the space, the quiet. And security."
When the family's benefactor handed over the garage door opener on moving day, Pastor Baumgartner stared at it.
"I've never even had a garage," she later said, though it's all undesired luxury.
"This is not a move I wanted to make. Maya and I aren't quite on the same page. I cried when we left the old place."
Pastor Baumgartner acknowledges that the move might somehow be pivotal, although she can't yet articulate its significance. The house with the wrap-around back deck is theirs until August. After that, the pastor doesn't know where she'll live.
But after years of living cheek-by-jowl with her North Toledo church, she's confident no one now will think "my ministry will be any less."
Joy amid struggles
Bishop Lohrmann showed up at Salem on an April Sunday morning and found both "a congregation of people who are struggling to make it" and "a sense of joy."
Pastor Kuhn, the intern, agrees. Enrolled now in Philadelphia's Lutheran Theological Seminary, she'll seek urban ministry after her internship and graduation.
"I've never seen a church with so much outreach. My sense of call has grown stronger. I like the people with addictions, with mental illness, [the] poor - and that's Salem."
While contributions throughout the synod are down 3.5 percent, Bishop Lohrmann said, more congregations are signing on as "mission partners" for Salem and other urban-ministry churches.
But even with help, there's no guarantee Toledo's oldest Lutheran church will remain open after its funds are depleted.
"I honestly don't know," the bishop said. "It's a combination of the degree of problems in those communities and … dwindling resources that really pushes us. I honestly don't know."
Roberta de Boer is a columnist for The Blade.
Contact her at: roberta@theblade.com, or 419-724-6086. Permanent Link
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